


wild cows, wild geese

by buckstiel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Cooking, Cows, First Kiss, M/M, Movie Night, Self-Hatred, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:42:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24263041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: Away from London and The Lonely, there's still a thousand things that have yet to be said.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 13
Kudos: 309





	wild cows, wild geese

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes.............you fully catch up with a podcast...........and go through the mary oliver tag on your tumblr.........and scream
> 
> so: title partly borrowed from a poem that helped get my thoughts together ([wild geese](http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html) by mary oliver. it's Good). 
> 
> unbeta'd. so it goes. may the eye have mercy on my soul

More than anything, Martin wonders which conversations he had with Jon in The Lonely were with the man snoring against the train window and which had been wispy tricks at Peter’s fingertips, which had managed to be both at once. There are so many ways to be lonely, and that place tugged and shoved until it forced Martin to admit that he wasn’t already intimately familiar with all of them. The fog saw him mumbling to himself, to figments of Jon and Sasha and Tim and his mother he conjured up himself for company, old habits with new faces. The Lonely put voices in their hazy throats, cutting remarks that curled Martin over at the shoulder to protect the soft center of him. They spoke among themselves and ignored his interjections, the shifting borders of their gazes still sharp. The Lonely wields numbness with its right hand, but in those moments, a physical pain wove through in a shooting, hot pain up his arms.

This loneliness, this was what Martin knew. And maybe there’s a chance he’s not fully untangled from its grip because he can’t bring himself to ask if the real Jon heard all his babbling about love, the metaphors and flowery language he’d normally leave buried in the notes app on his phone. The uncertainty of that gulf keeps his hands to himself when Jon’s hand starts to twitch from a dream, keeps his tongue held tight between his molars when he can’t quite parse the tilt of Jon’s eyebrows or the last few months of their lives.

So Jon sleeps, and Martin waits. The sun falls further behind the horizon the closer they come to the Scottish border until finally the night is a solid inky black around them. Martin imagines the dots of light from isolated houses along the countryside are stars and the sky wraps fully around the train car as it careens into space. Thoughts of The Vast creep up the back of his neck but he waves them away, for surely those bits of twinkling out the window are a sign of benevolence.

Jon sleeps, and Martin stares at the just-open hold of his mouth. He was tucked away on one side of the Institute’s vending machines when he overheard Georgie telling Melanie that Jon had gotten an inner lip tattoo on a dare a week after they had broken up--they shuffled out of earshot before Martin could hear what exactly it was, but one of his paranormal anthropology TAs had apparently picked it out. As Martin stares, he looks for an edge of black ink or faded scar tissue along the pink curves.

His thoughts stray to what else he doesn’t know, that hard barrier of knowledge that crumbles at Jon’s touch. He tries not to think too hard about it, because then The Vast does start to close its hold around his ankles.

Half past eleven, Jon stirs. The Scottish countryside lies open beyond the window, the clouds having blown past to reveal the wide chunk of moon spilling its light all over the hills below. In the translucent window reflection, a slow grin spreads across Jon’s face, but not enough to split it open, as if he’s trying to keep from pulling open some freshly-healed scab.

Then Martin sees it--the herd of sheep, small pale puffs in the fields with dots for the black wool of their faces.

“I hope there’s cows,” Martin says.

Jon catches his eye in the reflection, a warm glint hinting at something tethered deeper than Martin has words for. “We’ll find cows.”

*

When it became evident that the bed in Daisy’s safehouse didn’t have sheets, they retreated to separate couches in the living room, all thin lumpy cushions that whined at any movement. Jon passes out maybe before his head lands on the scratchy pillow even having slept the entire trip. Martin stares at the ceiling in the dark, wills himself not to fidget or squirm deeper into his attempt at a blanket cocoon--something in the metallic straining pull sounds familiar, recognition just half a step outside his grasp, looming.

Martin stops tracing a thin crack of plaster overhead and forces his own eyes shut, tries to slow his racing heart. If it thumps any harder against his chest, the couch will only complain in rhythm, jostle Jon awake if it keeps up long enough. (It’s unlikely, but what if, what if, the course of everything has been taking every _what if_ and spinning it up into reality, a monstrous patchwork, and--)

In a swift motion, Martin jumps to his feet and pads to the kitchen. The couch winces in turn, but just the once. He gulps a half glass of water in the dark and returns to the entryway, leaning against the jamb with the arch of his foot settled neatly over the dull metal strip marking the barrier between carpet and tile.

“You can’t get any rest standing there,” comes Jon’s voice, muffled by the strewn splay of his hair.

“You’re awake? I--”

“Are you hungry?” Thin arms, impossibly angular, stretch up until they pull the rest of Jon along with them. He shuffles over to one of his bags, a ratty knapsack with a faded Patti Smith patch half falling off--it’s bulging in places that it hadn’t been on the train. “I, uh… when you ran to the newsstand to pick up a village guide, I ducked in the corner store.”

“Daisy said there was canned food--”

“She may not mind eating expired baked beans, but…” Jon sighs, propping the knapsack against his hip so his other hand is free to pinch the bridge of his nose. “When we got here, I suddenly--you know, _knew_ a recipe for, uh… jambalaya.”

Jon steps around him and into the kitchen. The light clicks on, buzzing and stuttering until the sound is overtaken by the clumsy clattering Martin can only assume is Jon unceremoniously dumping the groceries onto the counter.

“I just…” He spins around and finds Jon gripping a bell pepper in one hand and an onion in the other, peering against the sheen of their skins as if they have statements for the taking. “Even when you needed to--I guess, eat real food, you…”

“You can say it. It’s true.”

“Rosie said you once burned leftover takeaway in the microwave!”

“As I said: true. But,” he says. The steps he takes toward Martin are careful, slow, a tentative ball-to-heel that belies how intently he’s studying his face. “The Eye has shown me how to prepare this dish. Which is what I am going to do. Just--” His gaze falls to the side and loses a luster Martin hadn’t noticed until its sudden absence. “Let me do this, Martin?”

Martin’s chest constricts on itself, ribs burning, and he hopes his blush is hidden by Jon’s distracted attention, split as it is between shooing him out of the kitchen entirely and seeking out where Daisy keeps her knives. _She can’t not have any knives around here_ , Jon mutters to himself, that and variations on the theme, and Martin holds himself very still on the couch so he can hear it all. His hands itch for something to do--dicing an onion with whatever semi-sharp implement they can dig out of the drawers, measuring out whatever spices Jon was able to scrounge together this far from a Tesco, fixing tea even if it means he has to boil water without a kettle. He has to stay useful, doesn’t he, at least to keep up appearances before someone drifts along, breathes down his neck, and considers if he should be let go after all. Plunged back into debt and uncertainty, shut in behind his flat’s front door until the next break steps forward.

(Even when quitting the Institute revealed itself to be a cosmic impossibility, he still fretted Elias--Jonah--that godawful man was going to upend everything. Sever the life he built around his colleagues, despite how much it appeared they barely tolerated him.)

 _I really loved you_.

He’d said that in The Lonely, hadn’t he? Said it to a murky shadow of Jon that hovered just inside his line of sight right where other figments rose and fell and let their eyes slide over him like a beige wall. Said it like a goodbye because he could feel the edges of his mind slipping into something dark that would strain against all hell to keep it in its spindly grasp.

And then all at once the thought crashes down on his brow, burning the corners of his eyes hot--Jon heard him then, the real Jon, and he feels guilty, and what better antidote to guilt is there than food, even if he’s pretending that The Eye snuck him the recipe?

“Wh--shit--”

Martin perks up, cranes his head toward the rectangle of light coming from the kitchen just as Jon jogs back toward his pile of bags. “Burned the roux!”

“The what?”

A half-empty plastic water bottle crinkles under Jon’s vise-grip. “Burned the roux--”

He dashes back into the kitchen, followed by a hiss and a faint charred odor wafting into the living room. When Martin appears at his earlier post at the jamb, Jon is peering into a large stew pot, barely able to clear the lip of it on his tip-toes. Smoke still curls up toward the range’s hood in a thin wisp Martin tries not to focus on.

Instead, he inches to Jon’s side--inside the pot is a thin bubbled layer of black that was, he assumes, supposed to be far from this pure essence of carbon crunch he sees before him. Beneath the acrid burnt scent, there’s something peppery and rich, but only just. “What…”

“The first step of making jambalaya is preparing the roux,” Jon says, words tripping over each other out of his mouth. “And I used the right amounts of butter and flour but--”

“Did The Eye leave something out?” Martin says, and he chews his top lip to keep from snorting. “Let you capital-k Know something while assuming you knew the intermediary steps?”

“One can only assume.”

“All right, then.” Gently he bumps his hip against Jon and grabs the pot with its smoldering ruins. “Let’s try again. I can google--”

“There’s no service here,” Jon says. “Besides…” His hand lands on Martin’s, following the curve against the handle laid in the crook of his fingers. “I wanted to do this.”

“And you did! But if you want it to be more edible, this is going to have to be a joint task.” An analog clock ticks loudly in the corner, the sound rendering it bright against the garish retro wallpaper. Half past two in the morning. “Let me help.”

Jon’s mouth presses into a line and his hand drops from the pot handle. “Fine. But--” The pot barely has enough time to fall from Martin’s grip and clang against the bottom of the sink before Jon hesitantly tries his own hip check. “I will clean this mess. If you could--”

“Maybe I want to do the scrubbing.” Martin doesn’t move, fights the grin shoving its way onto his face as Jon’s own expression tightens.

Again Jon hip-bumps him, a dark tinge on his cheeks, and when Martin doesn’t move, he sighs. “Please. I still need to chop the onions, and they…”

“Ah, yeah, sensitive eyes, I get it.”

“More so than ever before, for some reason. Age?” Jon shrugs. He doesn’t have to rise quite to his tip-toes to reach the bottom of the pan at this angle, but it still can’t be comfortable.

On the cutting board by the stovetop, the onion in question laid peeled, cut in half raggedly with a tarnished butterknife laying off to the side. “You think that has anything to do with--could it be an Archivist thing?”

“What, just because I’m an _avatar of The Eye_ , that means onions have more power over me? An unknowable entity of fear whose weaknesses include a root vegetable?” He snorts to himself, and Martin wonders how many times he’s ever heard him laugh, or if the fact that he’s wondering means he hasn’t at all. “Maybe. Who knows anymore.”

They fall into a rhythm one jerky step at a time, each taking care to learn how the other navigates between the sparse bits of counter space, who resorts to small leaps between the tile underfoot like hopscotch (Jon), who swivels precariously on a heel’s axis (Martin), whose reaction time lags and pushes the flurry of action toward collision (both of them).

Martin’s had fantasies like this--never exactly this, but something close if he discounts everything about being on the run. Him and Jon cobbling together some meal they’re tenuously keeping from spiraling out into the ether of inedibility. One of them humming something just out of tune but close enough to recognize and the sun catching the streaks of silver along Jon’s temple. A rich and spicy aroma overtaking the entire home. Each of them holding something steaming in mismatched potholders, stopping to sneak a kiss--

But he can’t think like that. No. It’s domestic but he can’t assume, can he? Their time here is out of necessity, not affection. Something in his head starts arguing with itself-- _he came after you in The Lonely, but he also went after Daisy and she’d tried so many times to kill him so what was that supposed to point to except Jon’s good heart_ , and on and on and on. Jon plops the pot down on the burner beside where Martin slides the diced onions away for the next target, and there’s a glint there, the start of a toothy smile that might as well be splitting Jon’s face open with how little he’s ever shown even half this much. And--oh, he’s just being nice, isn’t he? Return from The Lonely and reap the attention of the man you’re in love with as consolation

Just the attention. Just out of pity.

He wishes the recipe called for more onions so he could still have them under his hands as an excuse. Or that it were spring, and he could blame the pollen.

“Martin…” Jon’s hand on his shoulder lands like his hip bump, hesitation shifting sharply into self-consciousness. “I…”

He doesn’t look up from where he’s holding the butterknife, halfway through shaving off the inner core of bell pepper seeds. He can almost convince himself it’s because he wants to leave the perfect amount of rind as dictated from some late-night cooking show special.

“Maybe!” Jon says, far brighter and with a firmer grip on Martin’s shoulder. “Maybe if we both keep an eye on this roux, it wouldn’t be a disaster… or at least edible,” he adds.

Hiding a sniffle, Martin peers into the pot, where a chunk of butter rested under a snowy blanket of flour. The Eye must play tricks, withholding a certain amount of common sense; but instead of a dour pull of dread, the thought of the entity makes him laugh, and Jon joins in his own quiet way, and Martin can afford to forget that none of this means what he’d so very desperately like it to.

* * *

Sleep is not as restful as it used to be, as busy as his dreams keep him, so Jon doesn’t indulge it unless absolutely necessary. On the train up from London, for example, or trying to convince whoever is sharing his company that matters in the life of Jonathan Sims are as normal as they ever have been, thank you very much.

The first night at Daisy’s safehouse is enough to persuade him to drop the act for Martin, at least, so after they bring their butchered jambalaya to its end point, he has no qualms about sending Martin back toward his couch before the sun could rise too far, leaving him to slot the pot among the fridge shelves with all the precision of Tim playing Tetris.

And it’s just as well he’s left with the wreck of a kitchen, since nothing close to sleep hovers over his shoulder. When the chopped vegetables hit their unburned roux, Jon suddenly _knew_ about plans Tim had been making with his old group of pals from uni about flying to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. He _knew_ which hotels in the French Quarter they’d scoped out (Lamothe, Maison Dupuy) and which restaurants and bars Tim had contributed to the must-haves (Mother’s, Pat O’Brien’s) and which staples of Cajun cuisine he’d been most keen to try (so The Eye could be cruel to one of its own, why would he be surprised?).

He couldn’t hoist that burden on Martin’s shoulders, not when he sensed they already sagged with some incomprehensible weight. Or: maybe not incomprehensible, not quite. Peter’s influence couldn’t ebb so easily, nor could his own, the way Jon can sense reality contorting around his body and the odd angle it takes across the plane of his forehead.

Scratching at the back of his mind is the thought that Martin, as trapped in The Lonely as he was, has a statement to make. Jon's knees are closer to jelly than bone with the lean diet he’s been keeping, and no number of forced mouthfuls of their godawful jambalaya will help, and Martin is there, and Jon hates himself for noticing so acutely. He hates himself for imagining it, how some part of him is comforted knowing afterwards he would lurk in Martin’s dreams as an attempted safeguard against all the loneliness that Peter poured into his lungs.

It’s an excuse. He knows this almost as well as he _knows_ the flights Tim’s old roommate had bookmarked.

Helplessness is not a new feeling but he’s never learned how to let it exist alongside him without a fight. _If you force the statement, at least it’d be out in the open_ , that scratching voice says. _At least then you could talk about it without the compulsion_. The bit of the stew sitting in his stomach crawls halfway up his throat at the thought.

But this is who he is now, isn’t it, the creature that dips a sharpened straw into nightmares and comes alive with it, deepening the scar. Part of him still has a heart, and it aches watching Martin doze against the arm of the couch in the gray of the early morning. That same part of him knows what the ache is and, more importantly, that he doesn’t deserve it.

The sun rolls over the horizon and through the thick wooden slats of the blinds, and the first sleepy stretches leak pink across the crown of Martin’s head, illuminating subtle streaks of blonds and reds among the mousy curls. It’s nothing the glaring fluorescent lights of the Institute could ever hope to notice.

The ache pangs again, sharp and heavy and useless.

At the very least, Jon can keep Martin safe. He can hold back the tides that tore apart the rest of their cadre; it’s not the same as indulging that ache radiating across his chest, but it’s an acknowledgement. A nod. An appeasement, if only to keep it from swallowing him whole.

*

The first appeasement he sets his eyes on, both literal and cosmic, is searching out the local cows.

Not that he’s told Martin as much--he rouses him from the couch, trying not to grin at the imprint of the fabric along his cheek, insisting that their late-night culinary venture could not possibly have satisfied him, and that he cannot abide them not dropping by this cafe in the village. His finger taps at one of the ads lining the map Martin procured on arrival, and if Martin were to protest, the grumble from his stomach throws its lot in with Jon.

And since they’re already out and about, he continues, let’s get some air! The weather is a tad blustery, sure, but the sky is cloudless and supposed to stay that way through the afternoon. Martin seems hardly aware of the easy smile gracing his face, and Jon can barely stand just to watch from the corner of his eye--a content glow roses up his round cheeks as he holds the to-go cup of tea against his mouth without taking a sip.

(It’s a gesture Jon remembers from the beginning of their working together. He thinks he found it irritating at the time, though even in his all-knowing power he can’t figure out why he would have considered it anything but deeply charming.)

The village barely earns the title, a few cobbled streets of businesses huddled around the train station before branching off to roads of gravel and packed earth toward the various residences. Daisy’s cabin lies to the south, far from everything else and just inside a copse of trees. To the north, walking paths zig-zag across the roads, push up against crumbling mossy stone walls of a bygone era that trace the curves of the rolling hills. Against the bright blue of the sky, the vegetation appears a grubby sort of green, but that hardly keeps Martin’s chattering at bay.

“You’ve seen _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ , right? They filmed so much of the film in Scotland, you know, and it really feels like at any moment a knight is going to--you know, coconut over the--”

“I don’t, actually--”

“You...wait,” Martin says. “You’ve never seen it?”

One too many embarrassments in lower secondary school keeps Jon from spluttering himself into a corner, though he does hold a wince close to his chest with how sharply he says, “ _No_ \--I don’t really… _do_ films--”

“ _Holy Grail_ is a classic,” Martin says between deep sips of tea. “So we’ll have to fix that.”

“We will?”

“If I have anything to say on the matter.”

“Well all right, then.”

“Good!”

Martin opens his mouth to say something else, presumably aiming to add another film on this nascent watch list, but that’s when he spots the cows.

There’s a small herd of them dotting the crest of the far hill, all Highlands with long tawny coats that brush against their eyes and horns arcing around their ears. Their tails flick at the sight of them, a hoof digging in here, a snort blowing from a wet brown nose there.

“Jon, _cows!_ ” His hand lands on Jon’s shoulders as he calls to them. “Hello! Hello, cow friends!”

The only sign that the cows acknowledge his greeting is how they pointedly turn away. A few meander down the far side of the hill, their fluffy heads disappearing past the horizon, and Martins huffs in a kind of frustration Jon immediately associates with Melanie grumbling about whatever television program she’s just learned has a loyal following among the remaining archival assistants.

“Maybe they don’t like people,” Jon offers, and it’s clear within half a second that was the most unhelpful thing he could have said. “They were selling scarves back down at the cafe--should I go get a red one to wave at their faces?”

Martin’s face screws up in a way that reshapes how Jon thinks about anatomy, and both of them let Jon’s comment slide without further remark. “Oh well,” he sighs. “I wanted to pet one, but--”

“I could compel them,” Jon finds himself saying, and it’s almost an out-of-body experience, sending his nerves into high alert. “It’s not like--you know, a statement, or anything. But they’re not people! It could work.”

He’s already got one leg thrown over the fence despite the high-pitched skeptical whine building in Martin’s throat. “Jon, I’m not sure how smart--”

“They’re not avatars. They’re cows. It’ll be fine.” He stumbles landing on the other side of the fence, the stone having refused to offer anything his worn trainers could use as a solid toehold.

“ _Jon_ \--”

“It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had,” he says over his shoulder. “I’m sure we both could agree on that--”

“Could you _please_ hold on--oof--”

Contrary to popular assumption, Jon isn’t completely clueless about broader popular culture; so much of it is impossible to escape, especially in digging through the backwaters of online forums in archival research. So when he turns to find Martin halfway over the stone fence, he knows that the best way to describe his current position is _second-guessed planking_.

“What are you doing?”

“Coming with you,” he says loudly, mostly to compensate for the fact he’s saying it directly into a rock. “Obviously!” He rolls off, lands far more deftly than Jon managed, and jogs to catch up. “Look, it’s not that I don’t believe you can lead a whole herd of cows back here--”

“I was only going to aim for one.”

“--but this is easier, isn’t it? C’mon.” Martin bounces forward the next few steps, barely half a breadth away from being a proper skip. If his feet left the ground, he was likely to float away, thrown to The Vast from joy alone.

Whatever Jon feels from that--and he can’t spare the attention to name it--roils through him in a crash that his body can only interpret as nausea. He’s thankful his diet of trauma is not so easily regurgitated. “You’re right, you’re right.”

The far side of the hill slopes gently down to a sort of plateau before turning to a sheer drop down to a creek--it’s at this plateau the cows have gathered, and they eye Jon and Martin through the fringe of their fur as they reach the top. There’s an odd gleam of suspicion in their gaze, but Jon remembers enough of his uni psychology classes to wave the thought away. It’s just a projection of our own interpersonal assumptions, nothing more.

Martin coos at them under his breath, a hushed reverence. The cow with the largest horns almost seems to glare at him.

 _Fuck_ \--in what world are a handful of uni classes supposed to supersede every credible statement the Institute has tossed in his face? His memory has never been perfect, but suddenly he can see with perfect clarity the malignant gaze of the enormous killer pig from Statement #0140207, and that file never included any photos. “Martin, I think we need to go.”

“But they’re right there,” he says, and he jumps a bit when Jon’s hand lands on his jacket sleeve. “What’s--"

“Trust me.” Without thinking, he latches a hand around Martin’s wrist and tugs him back over the crest and the sloping expanse toward the stone fence that now seems an impossible distance away.

“What happened to being able to-- _Jon--”_

The low thud of hooves slapping against earth echoes up into the core of their bones as they run down the hill, half a notch below the speed that would send them tripping over their ankles and tumbling to a perfect height to be trampled. It’s the sort of end that, in the early days, Jon would have rolled his eyes at had it come in statement form. _But you didn’t see its eyes, the malignant snorting just over our shoulders_ \--

Martin reaches the stone fence first, barreling in stomach-fist and knocking the wind clean out of him with a choked _oof_ , and Jon finds himself running into his back; he wraps his arms around Martin’s waist and tries to use what is left of the momentum to hurl him to the other side, and at the back of his head Jon braces for the horns to jam between his ribs, for some bull to gallop in from the side and shatter Martin’s femur with a swift kick.

But it never comes. Martin pulls himself over and reaches back for Jon before his feet even touch the ground, grasping for his shirt collar like a lion closing their jaw over a cub’s scruff. Jon starts to protest just as he secures the hold, and he’s flung unceremoniously up and over, landing in a tall patch of dry grass.

“My _god_ …”

“Jon, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m…” He sits up, pulling a few sharp yellowing blades from his hair and jacket climbing to his feet. “I’m fine. Are you--”

Martin’s still staring out at the hilly pasture; Jon follows the line of his gaze and catches sight of an old local woman shouting down the herd back over the other side of the hill. Her knobbly hand shakes so forcefully at them that it loosens the scarf around her ice-white hair.

“I think she just saved us,” Martin says with a tinge of awe.

“I’ll remember for next time that cattle respond to a stern talking-to.” When Martin laughs, he adds, “What?”

“I can’t believe people say you’re humorless.

“I--” His first instinct is to protest, to insist _I am so a stick in the mud_ , but it falls short before even reaching his throat. Whether it’s because he spots the scrape starting to bleed on Martin’s chin or because the old woman tries to flag them down is not something he cares to dwell on.

“Christ above,” she yells from halfway up the hill. “You can’t possibly be locals running that close to the old Kells herd like that. Mean bunch of steers, that lot. Went rotten when the family up and died, see. Best not be bothering them--”

And so on. A ways off, Jon spots the top of a smoking chimney reaching above another hill, the beacon she’s slowly returning to as the tirade continues, and before long she’s barely audible. Something in Jon’s stomach flips in disappointment.

“What the hell was that about, then?” Martin says.

“Wh--oh,” Jon says. “Gaelic?”

“Or a very thick accent.” He sighs. “So… ?”

“Oh! Oh, right. Um…” The flipping in his stomach has risen up his back until it’s a sharp prickle at the base of his skull, which he scratches at idly. “Bad cows,” he says finally. “Maybe the kind of bad we deal with--”

Martin’s eyebrows shoot so high up his forehead that they almost disappear behind his hair. “I see. Well, you’re not getting a statement from her.”

 _Of course that’s what this wriggling was_. “Obviously.” He sighs, turning all his focus on that prickling until it reluctantly ebbs into something more tolerable. And still Martin’s scrape is bleeding-- “We need to get you a bandage,” he mutters, and his hand is halfway to the crook of Martin’s arm before he realizes what he’s doing and pulls back. And if he manages to convince himself that Martin’s face falls when he does, that’s a problem he can rectify in himself later.

* * *

By some bizarre stroke of luck, tucked away in one of the drawers of the console under the television is a VHS copy of _Holy Grail_ \--the sleeve has gone soft at the corners, and whatever glue once held the top end closed is on its last hoorah. It’s the only tape Martin can find that’s an actual movie, the rest shoved in without cases and without anything close to legible labels. Whatever’s written on them is some form of Daisy’s handwriting: all scratches and sharp angles and places where the nib of the pen bit through the sticker.

On the back of _Holy Grail_ ’s case, however, someone has written ABERNATHY in black permanent marker with the friendly rounded letters of a primary school teacher. (So the cabin likely didn’t belong to Daisy originally. Not surprising.)

“Look what I found,” he says lightly, standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

Jon doesn’t glance his way. He’s stuck fighting the fourth corner of the bed’s fitted sheet, a threadbare leftover from some dingy cream-colored set he found at the back of the pantry while searching for something that could pass as lunch. Underneath it was a half-used mega pack of chicken-flavored instant ramen, still within its best-by range, and the joint discovery lit a fire under Jon’s feet that Martin was used to steering clear of.

At least, when they weren’t sharing a small cabin in the vast plains of the highlands.

“I think it might not be the right size sheet,” Martin says after a moment.

“Then why would Daisy _have it_?”

“She kept her linen in the pantry. I’m not sure logic is really playing a big role here.” Martin holds the VHS to his chest, arms crossed, suddenly so very conscious of the fact Jon is making the bed. The only bed in the cabin, a full-size mattress with barely enough room for two people to manage, and a vein in Jon’s temple looks ready to burst trying to get it made. He tries not to dwell. He tries to think of anything else: the dull ache on his now-bandaged chin, or the twinge of thirst after throwing back the ramen, or the look on Jon’s face when he sees the knight insisting _it’s only a flesh wound_ , that glimmer of self-recognition--

 _Shit_.

“What was it you said you found?”Jon glances over his shoulder as he pulls the sheet up toward the mattress corner.

“That movie I was talking about earlier.”

“Oh! Wait--really?”

“I don’t think it’s Daisy’s, if that’s what you’re asking. So, um…” He holds it before him like he’s some prop of a game show assistant, grinning in a way he hopes isn’t too desperate. “D’you want to watch it with me?”

Whatever it is that makes Jon agree, Martin assumes it’s less the lure of the movie itself than reaching the end of his patience with the sheets; just before the Camelot musical number, not even a third of the way in, Martin is proven right. Jon’s head lolls, leans against his shoulder, and stays there, clearly fast asleep.

What Martin considers a nightmare has certainly shifted in his time working for the Magnus Institute, but this would still be a close contender for the top ten situations he would rather avoid more than anything if possible, thank you. His arm falls asleep within ten minutes, and he can’t even concentrate on the action with the warm bony body propped up against his own--not that he really needs to pay attention to the old flickering television with how many times he’s seen the movie, but it’s the principle of the matter. He misses his favorite line when Jon shifts further into the crook of his neck and a stray lock of hair brushes against his pulse point.

It’s all so perfectly aligned that, for a moment, he can’t be entirely sure that this isn’t some hallucination concocted by The Lonely to be snatched back into the void just when he’s comfortable enough to lean into the glow in his chest.

If it won’t last--and he knows it won’t whether The Lonely is involved or not--but Martin wants to sink into it, let the fear over the coming end sit on the shore as it envelops him, this lone moment where it’s him and Jon and the simple act of existing one moment to the next without danger curling against their windpipes.

The movie is drawing closer to the end. A bearded, horned man that Martin only now associates with a tiefling stands before what is left of the intrepid Knights of the Round Table. “They call me…” he says slowly. “...Tim?”

Jon snorts against his shoulder.

Martin’s entire body runs cold like he’s just been dumped into the midwinter Thames. Jon’s head is still on his shoulder. Jon just laughed at a joke. Jon is awake and still keeping his head on his shoulder, and should he say something, or should he act like he didn’t so acutely notice, or--

“Finally understand Tim’s Halloween costume from a couple years ago,” Jon says. His head lingers on Martin’s shoulders for half a moment before he sits up. “The getup was well-made but I think I was the only one who didn’t laugh when he said…” He gestures to the screen, where the entourage is staring down a vicious white rabbit. “What in the blazes is happening here?”

“I think… on a conceptual level, it’s not supposed to make much sense.”

Martin watches Jon take in the scene, the rabbit latching onto the knights’ necks with bloody sharp fangs. “I mean, this is clearly the work of The Slaughter.”

“I suppose!” he laughs, and the movie continues, and Jon settles back against him--his head never falls back against his shoulder, but even without looking, Martin senses the hold of Jon’s body curving toward his arm, wills away the itch to wrap it around Jon’s shoulders. “Were you…”

And he stops himself. He knows the question he was about to ask and can’t backtrack quickly enough. Maybe he imagined himself saying it, some evening daydream where everything unfolds just as his most fervent hopes spun up.

“Was I what?”

Of course he’s not so lucky.

“It’s nothing.”

“Martin…” Jon takes a slow breath and speaks in the careful, deliberate way that avoids weaving compulsion into his words. “What is it?”

A wave of vertigo pulses through Martin’s head, temple to temple, like if he were to focus hard enough he would see his toes curling over the edge of a great precipice. The temptation shouldn’t be there, to stick one leg past the end of the solid ground and let his poor sense of balance take its course. But it is.

“Were you awake this whole time?” He glances over to Jon and meets his eyes immediately, the ones he can see and, he assumes, the ones he cannot.

“I…” He ducks his head, suddenly finding the corner of the coffee table the most interesting thing in the room. “I, um… yes.”

The vertigo doesn’t shoot through Martin again as much as his stomach drops, limbs moving seemingly of their own accord--one hand turns Jon’s face away from the table, and the other holds the back of his neck, and then he lands with a crash. Kissing him.

Every ounce of tension in Jon’s body melts before Martin has a chance to panic; thin fingers grapple for a hold in the front of his sweater to tug him closer. What starts as a sigh in the back of his throat hits Jon’s mouth as a whimper, something desperate and wanting--Jon’s hands scramble into the curls around his ears, and Jon’s tongue is the first to test the deeper waters, and it’s not adding up. Jonathan Sims should not be gasping for breath and holding onto him like he’s the only thing keeping The Vast from flinging him into the ether. Martin has stepped into somebody else’s role.

“Martin-- _shit_ \--” Jon pulls back like he’s been shocked, hands splayed across his face.

“What did--what did I do?”

Jon shakes his head. It does nothing to quell the sick lurch in Martin’s stomach. _He’s caught on, he came to his senses, remembered what I look like and all the times I made a mess of it at the Archives and all the jokes he rolled his eyes at and_ …

He doesn’t realize he’s screwed his eyes shut until the spiraling thoughts slow from deafening to a gentle buzz; and when he opens them, he finds Jon’s hands digging into the fabric of his trousers, the glow of the lamp casting in a white sheen the tear streaks crawling down his face.

“Jon…?”

“You know…” he says, staring back at that old table corner. “You know what I am.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that I chose it?” he says. The grin tugging up the corner of his mouth has a defeated tilt to it. “I did. I chose it. I laid in that coma and the path forked: survive as a monstrosity or die. And here I am.”

They sit in silence for a long moment, and Martin watches Jon’s distant gaze, how it never wavers or blinks. “That wasn’t a fair choice,” he says quietly. “It’s hardly a choice at all. Who could blame you for--”

“Besides me? Or Basira? Or--”

“Jon--”

His palms fly back up to his face, pressing so hard into his eyes that Martin’s worries take a hazy, Melanie-tinted shape as he clambers around the tight space to kneel in front of him. His hands are gentle wrapping themselves around Jon’s wrists, guiding them down and cradling them between his own.

“Ever since we left London, I can’t get my head to shut up about…” Jon says, “...christ, taking your statement about The Lonely.”

“You haven’t, though.” Martin chases his eyes when he tries to glance away. “You haven’t. And are you going to?”

“I--no!”

“So we’re cool. Hey,” he says, reaching forward to tip up Jon’s chin. “I mean it.”

And Jon’s face collapses in more fondness than Martin has ever seen from the man, and then he’s kissing Martin, holding his head and running his thumbs along his cheekbones like it’s something precious. His head spins, that vertigo again. He climbs back onto the couch clumsily, the lumps digging into his knees, and as soon as he’s stable, he kisses a line down Jon’s jaw to his neck until he gasps.

“I love you, you know.”

Martin leans back from where he was staking out the best location for a bruise. “What?”

“You’re the bravest man I’ve ever met.”

Time slows as Martin’s brow furrows taking in his words. Jon loves him. Jon loves him, and he thinks he’s _brave_. Jon loves that he’s _brave_ more than he loves what he can do for him, because that’s what falls from his mouth when all his nerves are alight under his touch. Jon loves him, and Jon thinks he’s brave, and now he knows he’s not imagining all of this--even in his most self-indulgent dreams, he never would have dared assume that anyone, much less Jon, could look at him and see anything resembling courage.

“I love you, too.”

“Oh, good.” One of Jon’s hands latches around his chin, pulls him in close for a languid, dragging kiss that would have left Martin’s knees close to collapse had he been standing.

Time still lolls by at its own pace, gradual and inconsistent, each tick of the second-hand from the kitchen only reaching his ears when Jon’s hands reposition themselves against his hips, or Martin coaxes forth a whine kissing the hollow of his throat, or the great looming eye peering through Jon’s forehead lets itself flutter shut. Just this once, Martin senses. Just this one reprieve. Of course something else is charging toward them, teeth bared, and won’t dare to be so kind.

Jon laces their fingers together, and the fear Martin expects to settle into his bones never comes. Jon kisses his temple, and for the first time, Martin can conjure up the coming peril in his mind’s eye and stare it down without wavering--Martin can call himself brave.


End file.
